January 24, 2013 | By a Minghui correspondent in Heilongjiang Province, China

(Minghui.org) Male guard Qu Jialiang at the Heilongjiang Women’s Prison slapped Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Lu Yinghua in the face about eight times and also slapped two other practitioners while he was drunk on duty. This abuse took place around 8:00 p.m. on January 6, 2013 while he took roll call in Ward No. 2. His brutality angered everyone detained in the prison, and 300 people held a hunger strike and stopped doing forced labor the next day to protest.

When guard Qu Jialiang called Lu Yinghua from the roll that evening, he forced the forty-year-old Ms. Lu to stand in front of a window, and then made her kneel down. Ms. Lu refused to comply with his unreasonable demand. Qu slapped her in the face about eight times, causing her face to swell up. Qu also kicked her.

Ms. Lu suffered a heart attack after being beaten and was sent to the hospital for emergency treatment. She was out of danger only after she was given oxygen for 3 hours. Ms. Dong’s blood pressure reached 180, while Ms. Zhang’s blood pressure reached 160. An inmate assigned to monitor Ms. Dong also suffered a heart attack and was sent to the hospital for emergency treatment.

All the detainees in the prison were upset by the guard’s beating the defenseless practitioners. When 10 p.m. came, no one went to sleep; instead they shouted their demands to see the prison head. Everyone in the entire building was waiting to see how this incident would be handled. When the detainees wept in frustration that night, Nie Jing, prison head in charge of production, came and cursed them.

The next day, all illegally detained practitioners and inmates with a sense of justice, a total of three hundred people, held a hunger strike and stopped doing forced labor. The patrol team and the guards on duty blamed the criminal inmates for not obeying the management and gathering to make trouble, and justified the beating incident by saying that Falun Gong practitioners had not answered the roll call. Everyone was very angry.

Prison head Bai Yingxian didn’t offer any explanation. Instead, he forced everyone to squat in the corridor as he took the roll call, as a punishment to all Falun Gong practitioners and inmates in the prison. In the end, guard Qu Jialiang only admitted that he beat people, but denied that he was drunk. It has been learned that the video of that day’s incident has been deleted in order to cover up the guard’s crimes.

Background

In order to deprive illegally detained Falun Gong practitioners of their freedom of belief, Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison guards have adopted all kinds of debase methods: coercion, enticement, high pressure and intimidation, hypocrisy and deceit, prolonged sleep deprivation, being handcuffed behind one’s back and placed in solitary confinement, being forced to stand or squat for long periods of time, humiliated, verbally abused, force-fed, forced drug administration, beaten, being frozen outdoors, and so on. The brutal physical abuse and mental torment have caused many practitioners to sustain injuries, become disabled, and suffer nervous breakdowns. Some have lost their lives.

Ms. Xu Youqin, a practitioner from Shuangcheng City in Heilongjiang Province, was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment. She has been imprisoned for more than 10 years. Ms. Xu had bamboo strips inserted under her nails, she was shocked with electric batons, tortured on a tiger bench and forced to run under the scorching sun. After she passed out, the guards poured cold water on her and forced her to run again.

Since prison head Bai Yingxian and deputy head Shi Genghui took office, the prison authorities have brutally persecuted practitioners. In 2012, they picked several of the most vicious evildoers from each prison ward, including one division head and three guards, and dispatched them to Ward No. 11 and No. 9 to teach guards how to use despicable means to “transform” Falun Gong practitioners. They deprived the practitioners of sleep, and forced them to sit on small stools daily from 5:30 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. the next day. They forced the practitioners to watch VCDs and read books slandering Falun Gong in the daytime, and forced them to have a “talk” with them in the evening. If the practitioners refused to cooperate, they would verbally abuse them. Right now they have been forcing detainees to squat during roll call; practitioners in their 60s and 70s are no exception. They have claimed that if anyone refused to squat, they would send her to the ward for the sick, or Ward No. 9 and No. 11 to be persecuted even more severely.